Knightship

A knightship is a spaceship of type (2m,m)/n (that is, a spaceship that moves two cells horizontally for every one cell it moves vertically).

Sir Robin, the first elementary knightship to be found.
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Alternatively and in a looser sense, 'knightship' is colloquially used to refer to any oblique spaceship; we refrain from using this broader definition here.

Knightships must be asymmetric and their period must be at least 6, which makes searching for them using programs like lifesrc very difficult.

History

An elementary would-be knightship, dubbed "almost knightship" was found by Eugene Langvagen on March 23, 2004, which would be a period-6 knightship if it weren't for two cells that are incorrect in its sixth generation.[1]

The first true knightship in Life was constructed by Dave Greene in June 2010; based on Gemini, it travels at a velocity of (4096,8192)c/35567490.[2]

A knightship based on a different principle, dubbed half-baked knightship, was built by a joint effort in July 2014. This was optimised by Chris Cain to yield the much smaller parallel HBK.

The first elementary knightship, Sir Robin, was discovered on March 6, 2018 by Adam P. Goucher, using a partial found by Tomas Rokicki.

Also see
gollark: Go make Minoteaur or something instead.
gollark: Oh.
gollark: Just type better?
gollark: I will EMPHasise certAIN syllaBLEs according to the GTECH™ pronunciaTION rules.
gollark: It's a function of Lyricly to apioforms.

References
  1. "PLife Home Page". Retrieved on May 22, 2009.
  2. Dave Greene (June 13, 2010). Re: Shrinking Gemini: Four Ideas (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums
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